Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Want to be happy and successful? Try compassion

Economists assume that people are selfish. It seems reasonable to also assume that selfish people want to be happy and successful. So it could be in the interest of selfish people to be compassionate. This might be a variation on the invisible hand of Adam Smith, the idea that it leads self-interested people to act for the good of society.

Excerpt:

"The compassionate tend to have deeper connections with others and more friends. They are more forgiving and have a stronger sense of life purpose. Many studies have shown these results.
Compassion also has direct personal benefit. The compassionate tend to be happier, healthier, more self-confident, less self-critical, and more resilient."

The article also discusses compassion exercises that change your brain.

Below is a related post I did in January called "The Dalai Lama Says It Is Sometimes OK To Be Selfish."

"This is mostly a post from November, 2013. But there was another article
about something similar involving the Dalai Lama this week. So I have a
bit about that at the end of this post.

And of course, Adam Smith said when people act selfishly they are led, as if by an invisible hand, to make society better off.

So when might it be OK to be selfish according to his holiness? When caring for others.

Wait, how can that be selfish? Or is this some kind of Zen riddle like
what is the sound of one hand clapping? No, it's biology and evolution.
See Lending a hand does a body good by Jessica Belasco, from the San Antonio Express-News, 10-25-2013.

She talked to Dr. James R. Doty, a neurosurgeon at the Stanford
University School of Medicine and founder of Stanford's Center for
Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. Excerpts:

"Practicing compassion — recognizing someone else is suffering and
wanting to help relieve that suffering — just might be as important for
health as exercise or a healthful diet, some scientists believe.

Practicing compassion is associated with lengthened telomeres, the DNA
that protects the ends of your chromosomes and is a marker of longevity.

To understand why humans are hard-wired for compassion, Doty said, just
look at human evolution: Caring for others was essential to the survival
of the species. Humans developed powerful neuropathways associated with
nurturing and bonding with their offspring as motivation to care for
them in a hostile environment; otherwise their genes could not be passed
on. The same was true beyond the nuclear family when humans formed
hunter/gatherer tribes.

When we're responding to others' needs, though, we engage the
“parasympathetic nervous system,” relaxing us, Doty said. Stress
hormones decrease, and the immune system is boosted. In fact, that
occurs even if we just think about performing a good act for someone.

That's why intervening when someone needs help — whether in the form of a
hug, reassurance, financial help or something else — has a powerful
impact not just on the person being helped but on the helper.

Studies also have shown that volunteering, which is a way to practice
compassion, helps increase longevity — but with an important exception.
Study subjects who said they were volunteering to impress somebody or
for some other benefit, not because they authentically wanted to help
others, didn't enjoy the same benefit."

Adam Smith wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
One point he made there was that we are able to sympathize with other
people by trying imagine what they are going through (and I wonder if we
need to be good storytellers to be able to do that). Neuroeconomist
Paul Zak has been studying how the hormone oxytocin plays a role in
making us feel good when we have empathy for others (beware: Zak is a
big hugger). See an earlier post Adam Smith vs. Bart Simpson for more details.

There is an interesting book called Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination. It relates storytelling to evolution.

"Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field
of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology,
cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study.
Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the
human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play,
imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by
language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics
calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading
experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of
thought production still resonating within us.

Speaking
with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins
proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language
and writing. These include the brain's capacity to perceive the visible
world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated
mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech,
they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives.
Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary
bridge between humans' development of sensorimotor skills and their
achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific
perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the
distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to
poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference
between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination."

"Have you ever wondered why it matters that you care for other people?

It seems commonsense that this is a good way to live life. But there
are dominant philosophies today that suggest we need to maximize our own
individual self-interest.

This comes from economic theories of capitalism that suggest when
people look after their own self-interest, then society is better off.

The Dalai Lama explains why this doesn’t make sense in the beautiful
passage below. As he says, it’s an obvious fact that your own sense of
wellbeing can be provided through your relationships with others. So
it’s best to start cultivating practices of kindness and compassion."

Then the article has a long statement from the Dalai Lama on this
philosophy. But some economists might say that you can't run a
successful business if you don't care about others and try to learn
their wants and desires. Here is what Adam Smith said in The Wealth of
Nations

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker
that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their
self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their
advantages”"